


John: Return the Favor

by Classpectanon



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Anesthesia, Blood Drinking, Caretaking, Gen, References to Depression, Vampires, bad trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-16 07:02:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18686509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Classpectanon/pseuds/Classpectanon
Summary: "Do you have novocaine, or something? Like at the dentist's?" John asked, keeping his neck stuck out for her."No. It's venom, typically used to subdue prey back on Alternia.""Oh. Huh." John replied, his curiosity sated. He took a couple of deep breaths, and shut his eyes, and let the two pinpricks of sharp pain hit his neck.





	John: Return the Favor

"Are you absolutely certain about this, John?" Kanaya asked the blue-dressed boy while he bounced up and down on Rose's bed. His hair was still wet from the shower, skin a little cold, and he would be lying if he said he wasn't nervous about having an alien vampire feed off his blood, but he had favors to return. Kanaya at least looked just as nervous about this as he did, which somehow put him a little more at ease.

"Yeah! I already said it's fine. You guys have been helping me out a lot, and it's not like you can do the vampire thing with Rose right now in her state." John recited, a practiced little speech he had been working on already, ever since the conversation had come up idly at dinner two weeks ago. Rose and Kanaya had been helping him out of his depressive funk, and Rose was too ill for Kanaya to feed off of her without putting her in the hospital, and Kanaya was one of those nice vampires who didn't want to feed on anyone without permission. Everyone else was busy, the jigsaw pieces fit together, and John was always happy to return favors.

"Mmhmm." Kanaya hummed, dragging an alcohol-soaked wipe across John's skin. He had shaved his neck this morning for the occasion, leaving it clean, smooth, and bare. A small mountain of pillows formed a miniature throne for John to lean into, while Kanaya bent her knees and sat down next to him. "Very well."

Already, John had tilted his neck up, to present it to her. Kanaya shivered. A smooth, skin-colored expanse, open for her. She dragged her cool, alien hands (cool temperature wise, not awesomeness wise, but John still thought she was pretty awesome. Definitely the best alien vampire he knew) across his skin to find a softly pulsating vein underneath. She felt it twitch and thump against her fingers, while John felt her fingers up against one of his veins, and it was strange for both parties. Rose was always generally a cool customer, but John's skin was warm everywhere, surprisingly supple and soft for such a figure of, as Rose put it, "Raw beef". Tiny bumps where the razor burn was brought to prominence from the rubbing alcohol. Kanaya sucked in a little bit of air to avoid salivating.

"It's going to hurt for approximately five to six seconds while I puncture the vein and inject the anesthetic. After that, I will drink and then, as mollifying as it may be in certain contexts, I will have to lick the wound in order to ensure that the procoagulant is properly applied." Kanaya explained, as thoroughly enunciated and thought out as his own little response from a minute earlier. She put one hand into his lap and he clasped both of his own hands to hers, one above, one below, in a hand sandwich.

"Do you have novocaine, or something? Like at the dentist's?" John asked, keeping his neck stuck out for her.

"No. It's venom, typically used to subdue prey back on Alternia."

"Oh. Huh." John replied, his curiosity sated. He took a couple of deep breaths, and shut his eyes, and let the two pinpricks of sharp pain hit his neck. "One, two, three, five, seven, uh... Eleven, thirteen, seventeeee _eeeen_ -" John began counting, as he did at the doctor's office when he was getting his blood drawn. His voice hitched up into falsetto while he continued to count. Three seconds down. "Nineteen, twenty- Twenty three?" Was as far as he got coherently before he felt warmth begin to bloom in his neck. Eyes still screwed shut, but color was leaking into them, expanding phosphenes growing petals and veins and merging into kaleidoscopic rainbow domains in his vision. "Twenty... Twenty..." He slurred, his mouth feeling like rubber.

"Twenty-nine." Kanaya finished for him, the chill of her skin pulling away from his neck. He felt the loose, incoherent stinging of another rubbing alcohol wipe across the surface, and then a bandaid, but every one of these sensations felt like it was miles away. John started to slump, and then Kanaya pulled him backwards, letting him collapse into the pillow throne and turning it into more of a pillow layer. "Are you feeling alright, John?"

"Huh?" John groaned. He knew the answer was 'Yes', but for some reason, 'Huh' was what came out of his mouth. His limbs felt like jelly, and his mouth felt like it was rapidly beginning to dry out. He looked at Kanaya and realized in the back of his head that he was squeezing her hand quite, quite hard. He loosened his grip, and she pulled her hand away, letting it rest on his stomach. "I'm ffffffffine." He mumbled through a mouth full of marbles and cotton.

Kanaya was so elegant, so pure. Her skin was white as the snow but she turned off the glowing when she noticed him squinting up at him, and John thought that was awfully considerate of her. It was the least he could do, really, to help her feed. Wait. Did she actually feed anything? John didn't feel any sort of suction, but then again, he wasn't feeling much of anything, even Kanaya's unnaturally smooth troll skin several dozen planets away, a ceiling fan revolving molasses-slow overhead. It sped up in spurts whenever he paid closer attention to it, turning into a whirling death disk indicative of the chainsaws Kanaya liked to trim topiaries with. Time was dripping by like that one scene in Twin Peaks where the dude in the Black Lodge pours coffee but it's a slow sludge and it's really gross.

That's how John feels. Gross.

He doesn't even realize why it is, exactly, his face feels hot and his eyes feel heavy and wet. What he does feel is the thrumming rumble of Kanaya's repetitive "Oh my, oh my"'s, a concern that he doesn't deserve. She leaves his side for a moment and an eternity passes, left to stew inside his own head, and she returns not a millisecond later (how long had it been?), her skin blurry and indistinct at the edges as she hovers over John's field of vision like an angel of death. Was he bleeding out on the bed and he didn't know it? Was that the cause of her concern? Was this Heroic?

She brought the tissues to John's eyes and he felt confusion wash over him in an awesome wave. Why was she wiping his face? All of his thoughts had to be pressed through a fine mesh sieve to even be grabbed at, and all he could handle was loose handfuls of the stuff, incoherent and mushy. "Wwwwwwww..." He tried to croak out. 'Why?'? Or 'What?'? But neither word emerged, and instead, a finger was placed on John's lips. Kanaya said something that John's brain refused to interpret, and when he blinked his eyes, she had shifted positions again, and the fan was somewhere slightly different, and his mouth tasted like chapstick. He watched her put the cap on a stick of chapstick and return it to the outside of his periphery, and then, a straw in his mouth. The natural urge to drink was overwhelming, and the water was ice in the volcano that was his flushed body.

Why was she being so nice to him? This was just John returning a favor.

She pulled John's head into his lap and dabbed at his eyes. Finally, he realized that he had been crying almost nonstop for the past twenty minutes. Her hands ran through his wiry hair, and he let his eyes drift shut.

**Author's Note:**

> All comments, kudos, bookmarks, and views are seen, noted, and greatly appreciated. Thank you for reading.
> 
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